Yvonne Reddick – författare

Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature’s defiance. Yvonne Reddick’s understanding of climate change is uniquely personal: her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. The collection speaks of the paradox that her Dad’s gift to her was her love of nature and mountain landscapes. The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. This family story forms the bedrock of Burning Season. 

Burning Season includes a series of vivid, moving and heartfelt poems that explore her grief following her father’s death in a hiking accident. These are set against a wider backdrop of ecological loss and heartbreak. Here, too, are poems that celebrate nature’s vibrant resilience: planting oak saplings, spotting rare ptarmigan in the Highland winter, imagining life in an underwater city.

This edition/anthology focuses on photography, commemoration and reinvention, with particular attention paid to the memories that pass from father to daughter. Photographer MR Thomas writes about the October 1999 day that he shot the iconic group portrait of cultural legends RS Thomas, Kyffin Williams and Emyr Humphreys, at RS Thomas'' home in Pentrefelin, in Gwynedd. MR Thomas recreated the pose and attitude of an historical and historic photograph in the public domain that has come to be known as The Penyberth Three (of Lewis Valentine, Saunders Lewis and DJ Williams, the founders of the Welsh nationalist movement), transforming it into a new artefact, The Pentrefelin Three, which is published for the first time in these pages.

Yvonne Reddick drew on memories of the loss of her father in the mountains, in her debut poetry pamphlet, Translating Mountains. In her memoir published here, illustrated by her partner Jonny Kinnear''s atmospheric black and white photographs, she further probes that loss. More than that, she pitches it into the public global arena by setting her true story on the Instagram mecca of the crash site of the Bleaklow Bomber in the Peak District, where the US reconnaissance plane ''Over Exposed'' crashed in 1948, having previously photographed images of the nuclear blasts on Bikini Atoll. Meanwhile, exploring the father-daughter legacy in relation to the growth of rural rave culture in 1990s mid Wales, ''Bass in the Blood'' by Jodie Bond recounts how she and her brother weathered parties marked by drugs, music, natural beauty and benign neglect, leaving her with magical and yet conflicted memories of her father''s rediscovery of himself, post divorce.

European female-led writing with a focus on Wales, photography, memoir, writing of place and poetry. On the theme of ''Casual Archaeology'', it explores the rich archaeology of threatened estuary landscapes, the layers of time and affiliation in an Iranian exile''s relationship to her poet father, and how an Iron Age hill fort inspires ideas about health and immunity. Paul Cabuts traces how the renaissance of the photographer''s book in Wales documents neglected corners of our society. Steven Lovatt recalls memories of a Hungarian family visit in the second of a series from his travel writing journal. Angela Evans sings in praise of overlooked post-industrial estuary landscapes, introducing her new series celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Wales Coast Path. And AHRC Leadership Fellow Yvonne Reddick presents the best of recent titles championing female outdoor adventurers, past and present.

European female-led literature with an emphasis on place in prose, the narrative voice in fiction, diversity in poetry and beauty and imagination in photography. This anthology takes the theme of metamorphosis, and presents a feature-length profile of trans pioneer and travel author Jan Morris; the stunning photographs, by the multiple international prizewinning Vanessa Winship, of rural Ohio and the Amish community; a literary essay on female nature essayists, plus poems by the Costa Awardwinning Jonathan Edwards.

Anthropocene Poetry: Place, Environment and Planet argues that the idea of the Anthropocene is inspiring new possibilities for poetry. It can also change the way we read and interpret poems. If environmental poetry was once viewed as linked to place, this book shows how poets are now grappling with environmental issues from the local to the planetary: climate change and the extinction crisis, nuclear weapons and waste, plastic pollution and the petroleum industry. This book intervenes in debates about culture and science, traditional poetic form and experimental ecopoetics, to show how poets are collaborating with environmental scientists and joining environmental activist movements to respond to this time of crisis. From the canonical work of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, to award-winning poets Alice Oswald, Pascale Petit, Kei Miller, and Karen McCarthy Woolf, this book explores major figures from the past alongside acclaimed contemporary voices. It reveals Seamus Heaney’s support for conservation causes and Ted Hughes’s astonishingly forward-thinking research on climate change; it discusses how Pascale Petit has given poetry to Extinction Rebellion and how Karen McCarthy Woolf set sail with scientists to write about plastic pollution. This book deploys research on five poetry archives in the UK, USA and Ireland, and the author’s insider insights into the commissioning processes and collaborative methods that shaped important contemporary poetry publications. Anthropocene Poetry finds that environmental poetry is flourishing in the face of ecological devastation. Such poetry speaks of the anxieties and dilemmas of our age, and searches for paths towards resilience and resistance.